


Two Kids Contemplating All High School Had Shown Us

by mrsvc



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Human, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-28
Updated: 2012-08-28
Packaged: 2017-11-13 01:43:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/498045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrsvc/pseuds/mrsvc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Monroe's a kid with a past. Nick's one with a future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Kids Contemplating All High School Had Shown Us

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on my tumblr. Requested by linklaughingalonewithanimals. Prompt - "Monroe/Nick high school AU, Monroe meets Nick's family for the first time." 
> 
> Unbeta'd, except by me. Title from "Don't Bore Us, Get to the Chorus" by Emery.

Monroe’s a kid with a past. He’s got a strings of misdemeanors on his rap sheet - a direct result of his “anger management” problems, as the therapist calls it - and left an indeliable mark, mentally or physically, on the people around him. Monroe’s bad news, the parents whisper, when they see him slump onto the campus of the local high school. Don’t let him around your kids. They’ll end up in juvie, or jail, or whatever they think he did to get Angelina put away. Monroe thinks, fuck that, Angelina was crazier than he ever was, and whatever she’s getting punished for now is her own doing. That’s pretty much the only thing he’s ever told his mandatory therapist, too. He knows what he’s guilty of, and it wasn’t getting Angelina put away. He’s really patient, this doctor, and he was the one who suggested Monroe take up a hobby, something productive, to fill the space where he would have once acted out. 

No one suspected the clocks, though. 

Sometimes, when he’s alone in his room with a particularly intricate piece, he thinks that it’s a good thing Nick’s a kid with a past too. Nick’s got a future, too, he chuckles to himself, twirling the small screwdriver in his hand. Because Nick had transfered in midway through his sophomore year, wearing a leather jacket and his hair hanging in his eyes, and Monroe was already half in love before he sat down. Monroe was too old for this, too close to graduation, and too bogged down by his reputation around town to let his mouth go dry at the sight of a boy. 

It’s a good thing Nick doesn’t exactly listen to reason.

Nick breezes into the school like he owns it, and most of the kids around don’t even doubt it. He’s got a black belt in some obscure martial art and a little bit of a mouth on him that either gets him special treatment from the teachers or a pass to the principal’s office. Sean Renard doesn’t even shut him down, and he’s been running the school since he was barely a freshman himself. The kid’s golden, and it’s Monroe he chooses to befriend. 

Monroe found an old picnic table in the far back corner of the school yard, dilapidated and grey with age, and he sits there every day by himself. The benches are so broken down that he’s practically on the grass, and he’s probably going to get an infection from all the splinters he gets, but no one ever comes out to whisper about him behind his back when he’s out here, and that’s the way he likes it now. Rosalee is the only person who is nice to him anymore, but she’s got lunch at a different period, so the solitude is good for him. 

He was changed now. “Seen the error of his ways”, or whatever bullshit the judge had said when she let him off easy for his outstanding warrants. She was one of those “second chance” types, and Monroe was lucky he got off with just the court-appointed shrink. It’s hard, though, to go back to his school and see every one flinch away at the sight of him. Things were different now, but he guess he understood why no one would want to extend the hand of friendship when the possibility of it getting bitten off was still very real in their minds. Nick’s obviously stupid, or he doesn’t listen well. 

“What’s up, man?” he says, throwing his sack lunch down and sliding onto the bench next to Monroe. 

“Besides my blood pressure?” he asks, before he looks up and realizes who he’s talking to. He quickly shuffles back to his sandwich to avoid watching Nick slide a beat-up pair of knock-off sunglasses on. The senior guys on the football team had tried to take the swagger out of him on his first day, and Nick had dropped more than one of them before the captain, Renard, held them back and extended an appreciative hand to the new kid. Nick was practically famous overnight. Monroe had had to listen Rosalee sigh dreamily about it over the phone, and to be fair, he would have really liked to have been a fly on the wall to see it himself.

Nick snorts, and reaches over his shoulder to dig his own sandwich out. Monroe kicks at the dirt and gravel under the picnic table and murmurs, “you don’t know who I am, do you?”

“Sure I do,” Nick smirks, cheeks puffed up with food like a chipmunk. “My Aunt Marie told me to stay away from you.” 

“Marie? As in, Captain Marie Kessler? The new chief of the Portland Police?” 

“The one and only.” 

He knew her much better than he would have liked. She wasn’t a “second chance” kind of woman and had lobbied more than once to get him thrown in the actual clink, rather than placed in some sort of deliquient boy halfway house. “Don’t do well with authority, then?” Monroe deflects, focusing on his sandwich. Nick was young, and impressionable, and the old Monroe would have liked to sink his teeth in and pull him down to his level, get him as dirty as Monroe felt. He lets the feeling bubble in his chest quietly, entertaining it just enough to stop it from reaching a boil. 

“No, I just prefer it when I’m the one wearing the badge, so to speak.”

“Are you doing this just to fuck with her?” Monroe frowns. 

Nick shrugs, a fluid movement, and Monroe can hear the shifting of his leather jacket over his shoulders in the quiet. “No. I just thought you looked like you needed somebody who wasn’t scared of you.”

“And you’re not?” 

Nick looks at him then, sunglasses discarded on the table along with the crust from his sandwich and says, “I’ll wait to do that when you give me a reason to be.”

Monroe would like to say that was the beginning of a whirlwind romance, except it was more like the opening scene to a tragedy in which Nick was stupidly brave, and stupidly suicidal, and he - stupidly - drug Monroe along in his adventures in pissing off people bigger and theoretically badder than him. Nick walks around town like he’s asking for it all the time, and Monroe is more relieved that he’d like to admit that Nick has no problem doling it out either. He’s got a mean streak in him that, at first glance, you wouldn’t expect him of, and he’ll protect his family and friends like every word is a personal insult on his honor. Monroe found Nick with a bloody lip once at their picnic table, and he almost lost his new-found pacifism when he found out that it had been his name Nick had been defending. Pressing a wet paper towel to Nick’s lip, fingers laced in the short hair at the back of his neck to hold him still, he sighs heavily and can’t quite meet Nick’s eyes. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Nick rears back. “I’m not going to sit back and listen to someone talking bullshit about-“ 

“It’s not bullshit and you know it, Nick,” Monroe counters again, crumpling the bloody paper towel in his hand. The sight of the blood makes him sick - reminds him of when it used to be his hands that would make it well up on someone’s skin - and he can’t help but feel guilty when he sees more of it leak from the cut. “I’m everything they say, and more.” 

“Yeah, well,” Nick smiles, and Monroe can tell it hurts him to do so. “Not anymore.”

Nick’s faith in his transformation is a scary thing to have, and as the days tick by, closer and closer to when he’s going to have to decide what he’s going to do with the rest of his life, he doesn’t feel worthy of it. Nick bullied his way into Monroe’s life with his devil-may-care smile and Monroe’s just waiting on the day when Nick decides he’s had enough, or if he hears the right story from the wrong person and quit standing up beside him when the rest of the world falls away. 

“I want you to come over for dinner,” Nick springs on him, lounging on the hood of Monroe’s Beetle. The winter had moved out of Portland, and it was just warm enough now to be outside after dark without freezing to death. Monroe was two months from graduating high school, and he didn’t have any more direction than he did when he was running roughshod with Angelina and his old buddies who liked breaking laws more than anything else in the world. 

“Me? At your house? With Captain Kessler? Oh, no, man, I don’t think you’ve thought this through. She’ll probably arrest me on sight for something I don’t even remember doing.” He chokes back on his words, knowing he revealed a little too much, but Nick doesn’t act offended. He’s got one hand behind his head to protect it from the cold metal, and he turns slowly to look Monroe in the eye. “I don’t think you really understand, Nick. I’m sort of a persona non grata around Portland, particularly with anyone in law enforcement.”

“Well, that just won’t do.” The tone is jaunty and smart, like Nick thinks this is funny. “Because I kind of had a thought to become a cop. Take on the family business.”

Nick had told Monroe about how his dad had died in the line of duty and his mother had been so deep undercover, they’d told him she had died too, except she was in Witness Protection, and kept away from him until just a few months ago, when he and Aunt Marie moved to Portland to be with her. “A cop?” Monroe repeats, sounding stunned. “Really?”

“Hey, I’m just saying,” Nick reaches over with his free hand to tap Monroe’s arm, “it’d be good for you to have an in-man in the force. I’ll vouch for you.”

Monroe kind of can’t believe that he’s come to the point in his life where wide-eyed sixteen year old boys with big dreams take his breath away, but his chest is tight and he has to swallow hard a few times just to say, “dinner, at the Kessler-Burkhardt household?” Nick nods, his fingers still skipping across the skin on Monroe’s wrist like rocks on the surface of a pond. Monroe stares at the sky and tries to keep his emotions in check. “How bad could it be?”

Kelly Burkhardt reads his past on his face like he’s a library book, and she cracks his spine with one withering glance. She’s as unimpressed with him as if he was a worm on the sidewalk after a long rain and he shuffles awkwardly in the doorway before Nick practically drags him to the table for a stilted conversation about Monroe’s veganism that was mostly lead by Nick, in his bullheaded way, and arranging of plates at the dinner table. 

“I’ve kept tabs on your file,” is how Aunt Marie decides to open the conversation, and Monroe almost chokes on his broccoli. “Don’t worry, Nick hasn’t read it.” Nick gives him a smile that says maybe he just has, but Monroe choses to ignore that. He wouldn’t put it past him, the little shit, and keeps his eyes trained on his dinner plate. Aunt Marie looks like the type of woman who could cut you up and eat your for breakfast and feel no guilt about it, and Kelly keeps looking at him like she wouldn’t even bother cooking him first, and Monroe is comforted by the knowledge that at least Nick came by his sociopathic tendencies honest. “You’ve done well for yourself,” she pronounces, looking every bit the authority figure she is, and Monroe lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding in. Nick kicks him under the table and smiles at him, head bent down like he doesn’t want anyone to see expect Monroe, and Monroe glances down the table at Nick’s mother. 

She’s primly pushing her vegetables around with the back of her knife, a clear sign of her opinion on Monroe, built on heresay and things she probably read in the file herself too. Nick kicks him again, and the look in his eye is a little more desperate, pleading with Monroe not to say anything about it, and Monroe just nods. They both shovel the food down as fast as possible, barely stopping to taste it, and Nick’s halfway to the front door before Monroe can even ask if they can be excused. Kelly spears a piece of fish with her knife in answer, and Marie waves them off without even looking up from her wine glass. 

Once they were a safe distance away from the house, leaning against the tree in the front yard, Monroe laughs. “That was the worst idea you’ve ever had, and you’ve had some bad ones. I mean, your mom looked like she knew four different ways to kill me where no one would find the body.”

Nick’s hands are stuffed uncharacteristically in his pockets, and he snorts a little at the mention of his mother. “She was undercover in the mob, she probably knows four hundred.” 

“Remind me, if I ever see her on the street, I run in the opposite direction.” Nick takes a step forward, and Monroe sees a hesitancy he’s never seen in him before, and says, “what’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I just had a worse idea.” Nick’s close enough now that Monroe’s got an idea of just how bad this idea is, and he’s taking in a breath to tell Nick it’s a monumentally stupid idea, to get mixed up in everything he was, and is, and his family, but Nick just seals it all up with a kiss and burns it with the brush of his hands against Monroe’s chest as he gripped the fabric of his shirt. Nick smiles, lips still pressed against Monroe so that he feels it instead of sees it. 

Monroe keeps his eyes closed and sighs his name. Nick nips at his bottom lip a little, too brave and too bold and too much for Monroe to handle and never enough, and Monroe knows he’s lost this battle before he ever begun. “I still don’t think you know who I am.”

Nick nuzzles in close, nose pressed against Monroe’s cheek, and whispers, “I know the things that matter.” 

The porch light flickers on and off in a deliberate way that makes Monroe want to lose his dinner in embarrassment, and Nick laughs at his pain. “I never thought I’d say this, but I hope that was your Aunt Marie who caught us.” 

Nick traces his thumb over the contours of Monroe’s lips and says, “Save me a seat at lunch tomorrow?”

Monroe’s eyes trace the plump redness of Nick’s own lips, the splash of color left behind from his own teeth, and he pulls Nick in again, whispering “yeah, of course” so quietly he surprises himself. 

It doesn’t stop there. It’s takes off like a rocket, like the whirlwind Monroe had been preparing for before he even realized what he wanted, and it carries them both through the storm of his graduation, through the clusterfuck that was the last two years of Nick’s high school experience, right through to the day they’re standing in front of a craftsman’s cottage they’ve bought together on Monroe’s life savings and Nick’s steady policeman's paycheck, and wondering how they ever made it this far. Nick’s still got an attitude problem that gets his face busted by mouthy criminals, and Monroe spends most of his days battling his temper and fixing clocks, but they’re still there. Kelly thaws a little, when it’s Monroe pacing the halls after the first time Nick gets shot, and Aunt Marie never gets any less scary, but they made it past every obstacle they’d been warned about to be here, together, six years later. 

“Still think this is a bad idea?” Nick asks, cheeky as ever, and Monroe crosses his arms over his chest and laughs. 

“I always knew you were going places.”


End file.
